Guild Wars 2

I think the proposed changes to stacking are a long awaited thing that we were constantly told was impossible due to increased bandwidth usages. The vehement arguments about that aside, the additional changes to burning and confusion are blurring the lines between the usage of each condition too much.

Each condition should have a specified role and use, making burning stack makes it compete against bleeding now. Having confusions do DOT damage, also puts it in contention against bleeding.

Below is a rough break down of how I would have liked conditions (and boons) to interact:

Damage/Mechanics
Bleeding -> Short Duration, high burst
Burning -> Long Duration, moderate damage
Poison -> Long Duration, negate healing
Torment -> Moderate Duration, moderate damage / high on mechanic
Confusion -> Moderate Duration, high damage on mechanic

(some of the boon conversions get iffy, but room for adjustments)
Conversion Chart
Bleeding —-————- Regeneration*1
Blindness —-———— Aegis
Burning —-————— Might
Chill —-—————— Retaliation
Confusion —-———— Fury
Cripple ——————- Swiftness
Fear —-——————- Stability*3
Immobilize —-———- Vigor*2
Poison —-—————- Regeneration*1
Torment —-————— Stability*3
Vulnerability —-—— Protection
Weakness —-————- Vigor*2

So for example:

Bleeding should be difficult to maintain constant stacks, but with proper setup, you can provide large burst damage(think cooldowns for direct damage).

Burning should be fairly easy to maintain and threatening enough to compete with auto attack.

Poison excels in it’s secondary mechanic to counter healing worked well and remains mostly unchanged I believe.

Torment currently competes with bleeding, but I feel it should could better break from the pack if it had easier to maintain stacks, which punished mobility. Maybe something like multiplies damage to moving targets by number of stacks. That way a constant 1 stack will do low damage, but lined up with 2 or more it can excel up to/past bleeding with proper setup.

Confusion was good and bad. PvE it was horrible, PvP it was great. It was also the sort of counter part of Retaliation. Retal punished fast low damaging attacks (typically flury style hits from single skill use) while Confusion punished slow heavy hitting attacks (such as multi skill activation of cooldowns). Making this useful in PvE could be provided by adding a mechanic that forced mobs to spin in place and attack while stationary, regardless if it was in range to attack a player or not. This would initiate more “auto attacks” from mobs to help proc confusion more. Also making it easier to maintain stacks in PvE would be beneficial.

As far as condition conversions to boons, I always thought it would be intuitive if you applied a boon it would negate the effect of the boons for the duration of the pair being up (not cleanse it, just negate negative effects to zero positive and zero negative).

Also boon conversions seemed a bit wonky to me, so suggested some based on how I felt the mechanics worked. Retal/stability/vigor had a hard time fitting in, but kind of shoe horned them in where I thought they worked mechanically.

Overall, long post, wasted effort. But wanted to voice an opinion is all :p

I think that the condition changes are poorly conceived. Having a variety of different tools that have a variety of different uses in a variety of different situations is superior to a variety of different tools that are all but indistinguishable from each other.

Facing a foe with a fast attack rate? Throw some confusion.
Facing a foe with a slower attack rate? Use something else.

As far as I am aware there are a lot of traits etc that enhance bleeding, provide bleeding and increase its duration etc.. but not so much regarding burn..

I also like to look at it this way

Necromancer and Guardians both condi capable but weaknesses in each others primary condition

Guardians to my knowledge are far more specialized in burning than they are in Bleeds
and Necromancers are the opposite in which they are heavily bleed focused with little access to burning..

I don’t think these two are stealing glory from one another..

Bleeding tends to have far longer duration than Burn does but a lot less dps..

Bleeding is more of a long term preassure condition where as burn is more of a short term preassure condition..

I do think they need a bit more of a defining trait though..

perhaps Burn could spread to other players..
say if a group of enemies are stacked together then Burn will spread to all enemies within say a 50 distance radious..

this would be a fun mechanic to play since you could in theory cast a bunch of burn on one enemy then knock it back into a crowd and set them all on fire

Your conversion example clearly shows the problem, GW2 has. GW2 has way more conditions, than it has boons.
And its incomplete. GW2 needs more Boons as a part of Game Balance, as also so that each Condition has also a fitting Counter Boon for conversion.

Something along the line like this:

Bleeding = Regeneration
Slow = Quickness – New with HoT
Chill = Alacrity – New with HoT
Cripple = Swiftness
Weakness = Might
Fear = Resistance – New with HoT
Immobilize = Stability
Vulnerability = Protection (Protection gets increased from 33% to 50% with the changes to Vulnerability to have a boon, that can negate the full 25 stacks of Vulnerability instantly)
Confusion = Concentration
Burning = Sturdiness
Taunt = Retaliation – New with HoT
Torment = Vigor
Blindness = Cunning
Fatigue = Fury
Petrification* = Aegis
*Needs to become finally a real condition, so that for example Ele Earth Skills can do that also.

Sturdiness = Increase for every Stack of Intensity your maximum Toughness and Vitality as an opposite Boon of Might, just for increased defense and to be able to survive better Condition Spam as like high critical hits.

Concentration = Makes you temporarely immune against Daze, Stuns and Knockdowns. Basically a weaker form of Stability with longer durations, but you can get feared and immobilized. Increases also your Healing Power.

Cunning = Your next skill used is 100% guaranteed to hit, as it ignores all blocks and all reflections

Fatigue = Reduces the maximum Critical Damage you can receive and the Chance of receive Critical Hits from a fatigued foe is reduced. Direct opposite of Fury. It reduces Critical Hit Chance by 20% and lowers your Ferocity, cause when you are dead fatigued, you hardly can be anymore at the same time very ferocious >.>

If ANet would do something like this, GW2 would be alot more fun and would look for once at the moment “complete and consistent” and not like a switzer cheese full of holes

I know they already programmed the changes to stacking, but I feel they could have kept the 25 stack limit with simple adjustments to the condition concept as I tried to describe.

What if bleeding only stacked in intensity but only refreshed in duration and not stacked (additional applications would reset the timer back to “5” seconds, but never go higher than 5 seconds?). Mechanically how we apply bleeding would have to be adjusted, but it was be a designated short duration condition burst.

While torment could stack in duration and intensity, to let it differentiate a bit from bleeding, besides the all ignored movement penalty.

Burning could stack in duration but not in intensity as it is now, but it would excel in long applications for constant damage. Currently bleeding can persist for long periods of time AND maintain moderate to high stacks, making it TOO powerful over all the other conditions.

Poison I feel it pretty spot on, maybe shorter duration, so it isn’t so easy to maintain perma poison, if anything.

Confusion is again readily admitted to excel in one game type and under perform in the rest. I don’t like the proposed idea that it will do DoT damage, but I don’t have a great solution for it either. The low hanging fruit would be the PvE/PvP split, and greatly enhance the duration for PvE, so it could maintain for say….10 seconds at maximum? PvP it would maintain short duration of 2-3 seconds.

By shortening the duration of intensity stacking boons, you avoid the prospect of 700 stacks of bleeding on a target, while maintaining all the players are able to put out their own condition damage without the threat of others overwriting them.

I am not looking forward to group condition applications in PvP/WvW where I suddenly have 50 stacks of bleeding all ticking for 700 damage each on me and I’m taking 35,000 damage a second……….. condition stack limits needed to be there for pvp, pve it needed a solution to make it viable. This new change makes it sound like it will be ridiculous in pvp.

Again, I know too little too late, but maybe a dev will see this and consider it in the future.

Ashen.2907:

I think that the condition changes are poorly conceived. Having a variety of different tools that have a variety of different uses in a variety of different situations is superior to a variety of different tools that are all but indistinguishable from each other.

Facing a foe with a fast attack rate? Throw some confusion.
Facing a foe with a slower attack rate? Use something else.

But there are almost no foes in all of PvE with a fast enough attack rate to make confusion viable. Therefore, confusion isn’t really viable in all of PvE. If you’re a PvPer confusion wasn’t as much of a problem, but it never really worked well anywhere in PvE. That’s an entire condition that there was no real reason to use there. It had to change and I’m not sure how you could have changed it to make it better.

I don’t believe there were any good answers, for any of it. But I think what’s coming is a pretty good compromise. It certainly wasn’t working as it was.

Vayne.8563:

Ashen.2907:

I think that the condition changes are poorly conceived. Having a variety of different tools that have a variety of different uses in a variety of different situations is superior to a variety of different tools that are all but indistinguishable from each other.

Facing a foe with a fast attack rate? Throw some confusion.
Facing a foe with a slower attack rate? Use something else.

But there are almost no foes in all of PvE with a fast enough attack rate to make confusion viable. Therefore, confusion isn’t really viable in all of PvE. If you’re a PvPer confusion wasn’t as much of a problem, but it never really worked well anywhere in PvE. That’s an entire condition that there was no real reason to use there. It had to change and I’m not sure how you could have changed it to make it better.

I don’t believe there were any good answers, for any of it. But I think what’s coming is a pretty good compromise. It certainly wasn’t working as it was.

I do believe in a separate announcement they also made note that they plan on buffing confusion further in PvE by multiplying its damage coefficient in PvE (Not WvW) by something like three times.

CMF.5461:

I know they already programmed the changes to stacking, but I feel they could have kept the 25 stack limit with simple adjustments to the condition concept as I tried to describe.

What if bleeding only stacked in intensity but only refreshed in duration and not stacked (additional applications would reset the timer back to “5” seconds, but never go higher than 5 seconds?). Mechanically how we apply bleeding would have to be adjusted, but it was be a designated short duration condition burst.

While torment could stack in duration and intensity, to let it differentiate a bit from bleeding, besides the all ignored movement penalty.

Burning could stack in duration but not in intensity as it is now, but it would excel in long applications for constant damage. Currently bleeding can persist for long periods of time AND maintain moderate to high stacks, making it TOO powerful over all the other conditions.

Poison I feel it pretty spot on, maybe shorter duration, so it isn’t so easy to maintain perma poison, if anything.

Confusion is again readily admitted to excel in one game type and under perform in the rest. I don’t like the proposed idea that it will do DoT damage, but I don’t have a great solution for it either. The low hanging fruit would be the PvE/PvP split, and greatly enhance the duration for PvE, so it could maintain for say….10 seconds at maximum? PvP it would maintain short duration of 2-3 seconds.

By shortening the duration of intensity stacking boons, you avoid the prospect of 700 stacks of bleeding on a target, while maintaining all the players are able to put out their own condition damage without the threat of others overwriting them.

I am not looking forward to group condition applications in PvP/WvW where I suddenly have 50 stacks of bleeding all ticking for 700 damage each on me and I’m taking 35,000 damage a second……….. condition stack limits needed to be there for pvp, pve it needed a solution to make it viable. This new change makes it sound like it will be ridiculous in pvp.

Again, I know too little too late, but maybe a dev will see this and consider it in the future.

Your proposal doesn’t solve any problems. There are two problems with conditions as they are now:
1) Having multiple players who use conditions fighting together makes them both worse. Players interfered with each others conditions, which is something that power users don’t ever need to worry about.
2) Conditions do significantly less damage than direct damage.

Your proposal solves neither of these, and is instead just really confusing. The changes that are going to be rolled out soon solve both these problems while creating no new problems other than really scary Epidemic shenanigans, which can be dealt with by putting a stack limit on that one skill.

I agree a change needed to be made, not saying remove the stack limit at all.

allowing multiple people to stack conditions is good and helps them all contribute damage instead of being dropped off by stack limits.

By Epidemic shenanigans I assume you mean bleed stacking scenario I described, only an issue for pvp/wvw honestly, but what is the compromise. Limited pve usage with stack caps or overpowered in pvp without stack caps.

My intent was the give each condition a role. I felt they were clearly defined roles of long duration low damage, short duration high damage, and minute variations in between them.

If that was too complicated to understand, then I guess you don’t see a problem with everything basically becoming a different form of bleed damage which stacks in intensity.

Again, I honestly don’t expect any real change to be made based on my comments. I only hope that they spark future thought for developers should they read it, or even carry over into other games and developments. I enjoy the game and want to contribute, so I offer input. Regardless on if it is taken or not, I want to offer what I can and maybe it turns out to be helpful.

CMF.5461:

the additional changes to burning and confusion are blurring the lines between the usage of each condition too much

I agree. ArenaNet’s answer to the conditions issue is simply to make all of them basically the same thing. Instead of, you know, actually improving their game design.

Want a simple example? Confusion. They say it’s not as useful in PvE because almost all enemies have very slow attacks. The best fix here isn’t to change how confusion works, rather to change how the enemies work so instead of having the same lazy, repetitive design everywhere, we have some enemies with slow strong attacks, and some enemies with fast attacks and thus very vulnerable to the current confusion.

These are all very good and valid comments. I just want to nit pick something though. The assertion that all conditions now “compete” with each other because they are too similar is not completely accurate.

Having 10 bleeds and 10 burning is now really similar, true. Whats the point here? What’s the difference? Why not just have 20 bleed or 20 burn? Condition removal is a good reason. Let’s say you cleanse 1 condition with a skill (Smite Condition for example). With the 10/10 split, you still have 10 stacks of something.

Basically what I’m getting at is with a variety of conditions, cleansing them doesn’t wipe them all out entirely (unless it’s a powerful one like Consume Conditions). That’s something at least… I know this doesn’t change the homogenization issue, but I wanted to point out that bit of minutiae.

Xenon.4537:

Having 10 bleeds and 10 burning is now really similar, true. Whats the point here? What’s the difference? Why not just have 20 bleed or 20 burn? Condition removal is a good reason. Let’s say you cleanse 1 condition with a skill (Smite Condition for example). With the 10/10 split, you still have 10 stacks of something.

That’s mostly irrelevant in PvE.

More importantly, it’s a sign that HoT will not change PvE around. We have a very stale game today because basically all enemies follow the same pattern – the bosses tend to be big HP sponges with slow, hard hitting attacks. Based on ArenaNet’s reasons for not changing conditions, HoT will be just more of that same, instead of bringing significant changes.

Xenon.4537:

These are all very good and valid comments. I just want to nit pick something though. The assertion that all conditions now “compete” with each other because they are too similar is not completely accurate.

Having 10 bleeds and 10 burning is now really similar, true. Whats the point here? What’s the difference? Why not just have 20 bleed or 20 burn? Condition removal is a good reason. Let’s say you cleanse 1 condition with a skill (Smite Condition for example). With the 10/10 split, you still have 10 stacks of something.

Basically what I’m getting at is with a variety of conditions, cleansing them doesn’t wipe them all out entirely (unless it’s a powerful one like Consume Conditions). That’s something at least… I know this doesn’t change the homogenization issue, but I wanted to point out that bit of minutiae.

Pretty good bit of minutiae detail, I’ll be honest. I can’t argue against the need to allow condition damage the ability to persist to some degree past condition removal, otherwise it would be a hard counter to any type of condition damage.

That said, condition removal “should” be reserved for avoidance of burst damage, much in the same way that damage mitigation/avoidance skills should be used to reduce direct damage burst.

Conditions I feel should be mostly ignored and allowed to persist under my scenario would be

• Burning – Easy application, moderate to low damage, equivalent to auto attack
• Blind – Can be expired quickly without need of condition removal, just do not waste big skills with it active
• Confusion – Avoid attacking, let it expire unless imminent death or win is present

Conditions I feel should be immediately removed

• Bleeding – High stacks of bleeding would equate to burst damage, so cutting the stacks in half or completely removing them would be equivalent to blocking or avoiding huge direct damage burst.
• Immobilize – Damage setup with both direct damage and conditions is easy to recognize when you get singled out and immobilized, so quick removal of this is key
• Poison – In the event you need to heal, poison is high priority, so counter play would be in recognizing when poison is on cooldown and when it is safe to heal (should not be easy to keep reapplying poison)
• Vulnerability – With the change to vulnerability applying to conditions as well, recognizing high stacks of this is crucial to remove in fear of burst damage

Conditions that should be mindfully removed per situation requirements

• Chill – This should hinder ability cooldown to a greater degree, to help control the availability offensive and defensive cooldowns by attackers. I would envision this to have long duration and increase cooldowns by a multiplier of 2 unless cleared (to include auto attack). The movement reduction should be removed. In this scenario sometimes it is fine to let a cooldown take longer, sometimes you need it right away and you should condi clear it
• Cripple – This should be the primary form of soft mobility CC. Condi clear should be dependent on if you need to chase or if you need to run. Sometimes you can let it persist. Moderate to low uptime of this condition with moderate to high cooldown would be ideal
• Fear – Loss of control of your character for short durations becomes situation based. Do you need to get back in the fight right away or can you wait?
• Torment – A secondary way of doing mobility soft CC by giving the afflicted a choice, move and take the damage, stay still, or condi clear it based on stacks?
• Weakness – Defensive condition, so the afflicted needs to decide if they are about to do big burst or not and they want to clear the condition.

TLDR:
They key here is that conditions are “conditional”. There are varying scenarios and needs which they should create and ebb and flow of decision making, and not just mindlessly spamming application and removal.

Right now I feel conditions are mostly mindless. This new reform in conditions is making them even more mindless, I feel. So I wanted to voice a different opinion is all.

I said it in another thread some time ago. Conditions dealing damage is a stupid desing that is impossible to balance out. In pve it will do lower amount of damage as bosses tend to melt under power builds within seconds. In pvp either conditions will be op or up as there inst a middle ground due to high condi damage/condi cleanses. Condi damage is op against anyone with low amount of condi clean and up against someone with load of cleanses like war shoutbow or ele.

Conditions should be nothing more but a debuffs just like boons are buffs. Sadly its too late to change that.

CMF.5461:

I agree a change needed to be made, not saying remove the stack limit at all.

allowing multiple people to stack conditions is good and helps them all contribute damage instead of being dropped off by stack limits.

By Epidemic shenanigans I assume you mean bleed stacking scenario I described, only an issue for pvp/wvw honestly, but what is the compromise. Limited pve usage with stack caps or overpowered in pvp without stack caps.

My intent was the give each condition a role. I felt they were clearly defined roles of long duration low damage, short duration high damage, and minute variations in between them.

If that was too complicated to understand, then I guess you don’t see a problem with everything basically becoming a different form of bleed damage which stacks in intensity.

Again, I honestly don’t expect any real change to be made based on my comments. I only hope that they spark future thought for developers should they read it, or even carry over into other games and developments. I enjoy the game and want to contribute, so I offer input. Regardless on if it is taken or not, I want to offer what I can and maybe it turns out to be helpful.

Just because they’re allowing poison and burning to stack does not equate making them analogous to bleeding. The reason bleeding is so easy to stack to 25 (a necro can easily spike it) is because it’s a low damage condition. Burning, however, is disgustingly powerful. Point in comparison, my engineer, after everything with traits and gear is done, deals 5 to 10 times as much damage with burning than she does with bleeds. To top it off, I can stack burning up to 5 times if critical procs go off correctly (and nothing substantially changes with the traits and skills involved). That means even if burning’s damage is reduced by 50%, I’m still dealing a substantial amount of damage.

The main problem with burning and poison, is the fact that it’s a “whoever applies it first” condition. If you dont get that first application, you have a high chance of never seeing any damage out of your poison or damage infliction. Allowing them to stack changes that, allowing multiple players to apply them as well. It increases the potency of classes like necros and engineers, classes that can apply more than just burning, and in nearly as high quantity.

Additionally, you’re only comparing them to bleeding because bleeding is one of 3 conditions that can stack, currently only 1 of 2 that is a DoT condition, and the easiest of the 3 to stack to capacity. Frankly you’re blowing it out of proportion. Sure almost every class has access to bleeding with traits and skills (maybe not guardian? havent bothered looking for that class), but many of them have access to other damaging conditions, and often in vastly higher quantities, that not being able to stack those conditions effectively neuter the class.

Take my engineer for example. Sure her pistol autoattack inflicts bleeding every time, but it’s a short duration (compared to necro scepter) with a fairly slow cycling rate. Bleeding isnt one of her strong points. Poison? Can do that too. Reasonable duration, but it cant stack. Confusion? Yep. Short duration, but acceptable because the skill can hit pretty quickly in close range to proc off a skill windup. Burning? kitten. Yes. And in such an unreasonable amount. Her main burning infliction lasts roughly 20 seconds, and can be reapplied every 12 seconds. Add in other skills, traits, and runes, I can cap out burning to a full 60 second duration within a couple seconds. For substantial damage too. Now imagine if you could stack that burning? Less duration, vastly higher damage. I’d accept that.

And for the sake of posterity, no, she cant do torment without the sigil. Not much of a loss since it’s only a single stack every 10 seconds on criticals.

(had more, but ran out of time before work)

I suggested variations to mechanics and roles of conditions, to as not to all be simply more damage more stacks, more dots. So I feel you are the one blowing things out of proportions.

There is a fine difference between burning, bleeding, confusion, torment, and poison.

Confusion and poison are readily visible and accepted in terms of mechanical variations of punishing use of skills and punishing reliance on healing.

Torment is somewhat separate than bleeding in the reasoning that it is meant to punish movement (but we can not afford to stop moving, so this becomes a moot point where it is on and we suffer regardless on if we want to play smart and avoid the mechanic or not). I feel this could be amplified more in the terms of mobility and burst application.

Leaving us with burning and bleeding, thus why I make my comparison on lack of role diversity in conditions.

Burning does damage through duration and not intensity. Bleeding does the opposite, where it emphasis intensity and not duration.

So now we change burning to stack in intensity as well (with an expected nerf in damage per stack to compensate for overpoweredness). Now we have two conditions whose role it is to do damage and stack in intensity.

With your admitted example, burning is easy to maintain and bleeding is harder for you. So we just buffed burning and made bleeding even less useful to you.

That is a negative in diversity and defining roles if I ever saw one.

Sure, currently you can stack burning up to 60 seconds, but it will take 60 seconds to see all that damage. Think about things in terms of damage per a second as well as damage over time. Do not be blinded by the big number at the end, and consider the applications of burst.

Bleeding excels over burning in the sense that I can suddenly ramp up the damage per second for short durations and complete “1000” damage in one tick.

Burning will maintain a constant and take 2 or more ticks to see that 1000 damage, yet over time it will contribute to the total damage more than bleeding.

So in a pvp scenario, you have pressure (constant damage) versus burst (sudden damage).

Burst is threatening and unexpected/uncontrollable at times, and it secures a win. Pressure relies on sustain, and it becomes a war of attrition on who has the better sustain paired with pressure.

Combine them all together you have

(Pressure + Sustain) * Burst = Kill
arbitrary formula to show the difference in damage application

If two opposing forces have similar pressure and sustain values, then the one deciding factor is strength and timing of the application of burst. Bursting at the start can put a foe at a disadvantage and win the race. Although, you lose the ability to secure a win at the end and maybe your opponent can recover if your pressure is not strong enough.

Back to the point and your counter argument.

TLDR
I feel there needs to be a separation of roles that conditions do. I am all for widening the field to allow more players to apply conditions via stack caps being adjusted, but I caution against the pending overpoweredness of 50+ stacks of bleeding/burning uncontrollably downing players.

So the mechanics and application of these damaging conditions needs to be re-evaluated. The original intent with burning versus bleeding is seemingly apparent, with burning doing pressure and bleeding doing burst.

That role diversity is being blurred, and I wanted to highlight that point for further review.

CMF.5461:

-snipped for length-

Not really. Main difference is that I’m taking the “wait and see (while silently cackling in glee over burn stacking)” attitude over conditions. I know to wait and see how they develop. Frankly I’d rather see successive iterations to conditions with time in between to make sure they function correctly. Who knows, maybe they’ll add more to conditions at a future date?

If anything, I’m only making a big deal out of the fact that previously single-stack conditions that were basically “first person to apply keeps the damage” conditions are being changed to no longer be a “kitten you” to multiple players inflicting those conditions.

There is a fine difference between burning, bleeding, confusion, torment, and poison.

Not really. Bleeding is the “standard” condition, with moderate damage and high durations. Burning is a high damage low duration condition, meant to have a spiking aspect to it, yet bleeds could outweigh it at max stacks by a minimum of 5:1 on damage. I’m not sure how you could call the difference between confusion and other conditions a “fine” difference. It’s a condition with very high damage and very low duration, or very little damage if your timing is wrong. After the change, I suspect it’s going to be moderate damage over time and moderate damage on skill use, likely with the same duration as now. Torment punishes movement by doubling in intensity, but is more of a niche condition than the rest, with mesmer scepter vomit being one of the only regular applications of it. Poison? Punishes healing effectiveness. Unlike other conditions, poison was merely relegated to being a condition used to hamper boss healing. After the changes it will actually be viable as a proper offensive condition.

So now we change burning to stack in intensity as well (with an expected nerf in damage per stack to compensate for overpoweredness). Now we have two conditions whose role it is to do damage and stack in intensity.

No, there’s now three. Torment, remember? Moot point. Class diversity as well means not every class is going to have access to bleeding, or in such quantity like necros. Others will have burning and torment (engi and mesmer) that can take the fore over bleeding.

With your admitted example, burning is easy to maintain and bleeding is harder for you. So we just buffed burning and made bleeding even less useful to you.

That is a negative in diversity and defining roles if I ever saw one.

You need to properly read the reply of others. I never said bleeding was not as useful. It’s as supplementary to my engineer as the damage from poison she inflicts. For the way her build is made, she’d require at least 5 stacks of bleeding to match the damage from burning. Given the skills used in the build, that’s only possible at limited times, particularly when skill and projectile timing means she’s bound to at most 3.5 stacks of bleeding. I can sustain burning far more easily.

Sure, currently you can stack burning up to 60 seconds, but it will take 60 seconds to see all that damage. Think about things in terms of damage per a second as well as damage over time. Do not be blinded by the big number at the end, and consider the applications of burst.

Again, please read the replies of others. If you had, and knew the engi class, you’d know that it takes several skills and traits to reach that duration. My engi would have no problems with bursting burning.

TLDR -snipped for length-

You dont need to highlight anything. You should realize that this is simply an iteration for conditions. Anet’s not going to simply go “here, have this change, we’re moving on to other things” and let things descend into chaos. They might for other things, but I sincerely doubt they will for something that happens to be a major component of the game’s combat system. To that end, they’re going to be giving us a long-deserved change to conditions, least of which is the cap amount (which they’ve said they’re trying to find a way to increase, and guess what, they did), and they’re going to be watching the result of the changes. What they see is going to lead to further iterations of conditions.

Honestly though, conditions being diverse in roles has been greatly diminished for a long time. Poison reduces healing? Oh well. Just heal harder through it. Torment deals more damage when moving? Oh well, just get some regen. Confusion was the only real role-centric condition, and it still will be. The main difference is that it’s now going to have the ability to PRESSURE opponents. Previously confusion was simply a matter of using skills sparingly until your condi cleanse comes up, and then you go ham. Now, confusion is going to pressure someone with a DoT, forcing them to decide whether to heal, condi cleanse, or whatever, and receive the spike damage.

I think Burning should be reworked. Stacking is good, but it needs a distinguishing effect.

Maybe it should be the highest damage stacking condition, but perhaps it could be removed on dodge roll.

Duke Blackrose.4981:

Maybe it should be the highest damage stacking condition, but perhaps it could be removed on dodge roll.

What an interesting, outside of the box, idea. Kudos.

Duke Blackrose.4981:

I think Burning should be reworked. Stacking is good, but it needs a distinguishing effect.

Maybe it should be the highest damage stacking condition, but perhaps it could be removed on dodge roll.

Too logical. This is a game where I can bleed ice golems and poison zombies.